April 03, 2006

Google as a Calculator

Did you know that Google can also calculate? In fact, for many tasks it even better suited than most desktop calculators as it handles all kinds of measures, too. If you want to know how many terabytes you would need to store the MD5 hashes of all possible 8-character passwords consisting of latin lower and upper case letters and digits, just enter ((26 + 26 + 10) ^ 8) * 16 bytes in terabytes into Google and you get the result: ((26 + 26 + 10) ^ 8) * 16 bytes = 3 177.26671 terabytes (you see, its not so many - a millionaire could afford the hds).
By the way, Google can even calculate the answer to life, the universe and everything in a feasible period of time. But I suspect they have the result cached ;-)